Comments on: Giving ancient life another chance to evolve

By: Bruce Wright

Bruce Wright — Thu, 02 Aug 2012 03:16:44 +0000

The non-technical summary sounds like the implication is that there are many possible solutions and that evolution need not repeat itself. This is what you’d be most likely to predict based on what we observe: although evolution often converges on “similar” solutions to similar problems, they are very rarely if ever identical solutions. Additionally, the gene search space is so huge that it seems highly unlikely that evolution could reliably find the optimal path through it, or always find exactly the same solutions. So this is an entirely unsurprising result, but it’s nice to see that what most biologists would predict does in fact appear to be the way things actually work.

By: witsubrene

witsubrene — Wed, 01 Aug 2012 03:16:28 +0000

A single instance of the multitudinous possible paths of evolution will repeat? I think not. It may teach about evolution, but not about how we got to HERE from there.

By: egore

egore — Tue, 31 Jul 2012 20:03:17 +0000

If they can clone Dolly, I would think they could bring back anything they can get a useable cell from.

By: GatorALLin

GatorALLin — Tue, 31 Jul 2012 16:19:20 +0000

These ideas make me wonder if they can get the Mammoth to come back from frozen samples… http://www.nytimes.com/2008/11/20/science/20mammoth.html?pagewanted=all